When I was a kid the calm evening air would sometimes be dramatically and suddenly broken by my father's excited shout. "There's a blue on!" he would cry out from the living room. Sometimes this simply got shortened to, "A blue!" The tone was such that we all knew to drop whatever we were doing and come running to the TV where on the screen appeared that rarest of things, a black person. We knew we had to come quickly since the presence of African Americans on television at that time wasn't nearly as commonplace as it is now. Blink and you'd miss it. Certainly my father's forceful tone, which shot through the house, signaled that something of high significance was taking place.
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Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey
Photo © by Jason Smikle
About Me
About Me
Chicago, IL, United States
I began making photographs in 1969 after seeing the "Harlem On My Mind" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had inherited my first camera the year before from my godfather Artie Miller when I was fifteen years old. I began my first project "Harlem, USA" as a direct result of that exhibition and my own family's history in the Harlem community. Born in Queens, NY my formal training began by apprenticing to local commercial and fashion photographer Levy J. Smith and then later studying at the School of Visual Arts with Larry Siegel, William Broecker, Shelley Rice and Sid Kaplan. I completed my undergraduate work at Empire State College under the guidance of Mel Rosenthal and Joe Goldberg and did my MFA at Yale University in the graduate photography program under the watchful and rigorous eyes of Tod Papageorge and Richard Benson, along with Lois Conner, Frank Gohlke, Susan Kismaric and Joel Sternfeld. Classes with Robert Farris Thompson and Michael Romer significantly rounded out my graduate work. A former Guggenheim and NEA fellow, I am currently Professor of Art and Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago, where I have taught since 1998.
"What's Going On?"
"What's Going On?"
Marvin Gaye's signature song "What's Going On?"--a musical critique of a world gone off track--provides an apt framework for looking at the role of art and cultural production in the larger society.

With so much art being made at all ends of the market, it's always a good thing for artists to look both forward and back in trying to access the role that art can play in a larger society, a society that actually exists largely outside of the distorting bubble of the Art World. When one of my students recently answered the question of why she was in school in an MFA program with, "So I can be a part of the system," I knew it was time for a reassessment and a forum from which to look at the various histories in my own little corner of the art and "real" world.

Artists used to be the ones who led the charge to challenge the system; they were the proverbial "fly in the buttermilk," the monkey wrench that mucked up the system and made it act, function, and exist in new ways. Artists were the ones who created paradigms of everything the system was not. James Baldwin once said, "Artists are here to disturb the peace."

This blog will range freely over a range of issues, highlighting individuals, events, and ideas that provide a catalyst for thought and reflection. Hopefully for younger artists it might provide a sense of a world both in and outside of the so-called art world, and hopefully provoke a conversation about the relationship between the two while offering a thought or two about just what ones work might be about as one attempts to engage both history and the contemporary moment.

For others this blog might serve as a window into how one particular artist, after three decades of practice, sees and thinks about the vast world of human social and aesthetic experience. Consider this my own small commentary or my brain periodically laid bare for your perusal and consideration.

Feel free to use the "Comments" button to share your thoughts and responses if so provoked.
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